Deposed South Korean president arrested, jailed after long saga

March 31, 2017

South

Seoul, Mar 31: South Korea's disgraced former President Park Geun-hye was arrested and jailed Friday over high-profile corruption allegations that have already ended her tumultuous four-year rule and prompted an election to find a successor. A convoy of vehicles, including a black sedan carrying Park, entered a detention facility near Seoul before dawn after the Seoul Central District Court granted a prosecutors' request to arrest her.

Many Park supporters waved national flags and shouted “president” as Park's car entered the facility. An opponent held up a mock congratulatory ribbon with flowers that read “Park Geun-hye, congratulations for entering prison. Come out as a human being after 30 years.”

Prosecutors can detain her for up to 20 days before formally charging her. The Seoul court's decision is yet another humiliating fall for Park, South Korea's first female president who was elected in 2012 amid overwhelming support from conservatives, who recall her dictator father as a hero who lifted the country from poverty in the 1960-70s despite a record of severe human rights abuses.

Prosecutors accuse Park of colluding with a confidante to extort big businesses, take a bribe from one of the companies and commit other wrongdoing. The allegations led millions of South Koreans to protest in the streets every weekend for months before lawmakers impeached her in December and the Constitutional Court ruled in March to formally remove her from office.

It made Park the country's first democratically elected leader to be forced from office since democracy came here in the late 1980s. South Korea will hold an election in May to choose Park's successor. Opinion surveys say liberal opposition leader Moon Jae-in, who lost the 2012 election to Park, is the favorite.

Prosecutors can charge Park without arresting her. But they said they wanted to arrest her because the allegations against her are “grave” and because other suspects involved the scandal, including her confidante Choi Soon-sil and Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong, have already been arrested. The Seoul court said it decided to approve Park's arrest because it believes key allegations against her were confirmed and there were worries that she may try to destroy evidence.

Park's conservative party described her arrest as “pitiful,” while the liberal politician favored in polls to succeed her said the country took a step toward restoring “justice and common sense.”

The camp of Moon Jae-in, who lost the 2012 presidential race to Park, said in a statement that the nation should now “turn the page on painful history” and focus on creating a fair and clean country.

A day earlier, Park was questioned at a court hearing for nearly nine hours. As she left for the hearing, hundreds of her supporters, many of them elderly citizens, gathered at her private Seoul home. They wept, chanted slogans and tried to block Park's car before being pushed back by police.

In the coming weeks, prosecutors are expected to formally charge Park with extortion, bribery and abuse of power. Her bribery conviction alone is punishable by the minimum 10 years in prison and the maximum life imprisonment in South Korea.

Prosecutors believe Park conspired with Choi and a top presidential adviser to bully 16 business groups, including Samsung, to donate 77.4 billion won ($69 million) for the launch of two nonprofits that Choi controlled. Company executives said they felt forced to donate in fear of retaliatory measures including state tax investigations.

Park and Choi are accused of separately receiving a bribe from Samsung and colluding with top officials to blacklist artists critical of Park's policies to deny them state financial assistance programs, according to prosecutors. Park also is alleged to have passed on state secrets to Choi via a presidential aide.

Park and Choi deny most of the allegations. Park has said she only let Choi edit some of her presidential speeches and got her help on “public relations” issues. Choi made similar statements. The women, both in their 60s, have been friends for 40 years. Park once described Choi as someone who helped her when she had “difficulties,” an apparent reference to her parents' assassinations in the 1970s.

Park's father, Chung-hee, was gunned down by his own intelligence chief in 1979, five years after his wife was killed in an assassination attempt that targeted him. Park Geun-hye served as first lady after her mother's death.

After her father's killing, Park Geun-hye left the presidential Blue House and secluded herself from the public eye before she entered politics in the late 1990s — when public nostalgia for her father emerged after the country's economy was hit hard by the Asian financial crisis. She had since become an icon of South Korean conservatives, earning the nickname “Queen of Elections” for her ability to led her conservative party to win tight elections.

Park now becomes South Korea's third head of state to be jailed after leaving office.

Former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, both previously army generals, received a life sentence and a 17-year prison term, respectively, in 1996 on charges including treason and bribery. They were released in December 1997 on a special presidential amnesty.

Chun and Roh staged a 1979 coup that put Chun in power more than eight years after Park Chung-hee's death. Roh was elected president in 1987 after Chun's government caved to massive pro-democracy protests and accepted direct, free elections. In 2009, prosecutors questioned former liberal President Roh Moo-hyun over corruption allegations, but they later closed the investigation after Roh leaped to his death.

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News Network
March 25,2020

London, Mar 25: Prince Charles on Wednesday has tested positive for the novel coronavirus and is working from home with mild symptoms, according to UK media.
A Clarence House spokesperson said the Prince of Wales was "displaying mild symptoms but otherwise remains in good health and has been working from home throughout the last few days as usual", the Telegraph UK reported.
"He has been displaying mild symptoms but otherwise remains in good health and has been working from home throughout the last few days as usual," the spokesperson added.
In accordance with the government and medical advice, the 71-year old heir to the British throne and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, are now self-isolating at their home in Scotland.
The Duchess of Cornwall has also been tested but does not have the virus.
The tests were carried out by the NHS in Aberdeenshire where they met the criteria required for testing.
"It is not possible to ascertain from whom the Prince caught the virus owing to the high number of engagements he carried out in his public role during recent weeks," the statement further said.

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News Network
May 8,2020

New York, May 8: An Indian-American father and daughter, both doctors in New Jersey, have died due to the COVID-19, with Governor Phil Murphy describing their demise as “particularly tough" and hailed them for dedicating their lives for others.

Satyender Dev Khanna, 78, was a surgeon who served both on staff and as the head of the surgical departments for multiple hospitals across New Jersey for decades.

Priya Khanna, 43, was a double board-certified in both internal medicine and nephrology. She was Chief of Residents at Union Hospital, now part of RWJ Barnabas Health.

"Dr Satyender Dev Khanna and Dr Priya Khanna were father and daughter. They both dedicated their lives to helping others. This is a family dedicated to health and medicine. Our words cannot amply express our condolences," New Jersey Governor Murphy tweeted on Thursday.

“Both dedicated their lives to helping others and we lost both of them to COVID-19,” Murphy said during a press conference on Thursday, saying their demise is a "particularly tough one.”

Satyender passed away at the Clara Maass Medical Center where he had worked for more than 35 years.

Murphy described him as a "pioneering doctor” who was one of the first surgeons to perform laparoscopic surgery in the state. He is being remembered by colleagues as a “gentle and caring physician."

“And for a doctor, I'm not one, but I would bet, I don't think there could be a more fitting way to be remembered, or a nurse or a healthcare worker of any kind,” Murphy said, adding that the doctor had a passion for bicycling, and he often found peace from the hustle of the hospital in biking along the Jersey Shore.

Priya did all of her medical training in New Jersey and then did her fellowship in nephrology in South Jersey with the Cooper Health System. Like her father, she too worked at Clara Maass, where she died.

She was also Medical Director at two dialysis centres in Essex County and “took pride” in teaching the next generation of doctors, Murphy said, adding that the ICU physician who cared for Priya Khanna was trained and taught by her as well.

Follow live developments on the coronavirus pandemic here

“Priya will be remembered as a caring and selfless person who put others first. And even while in the hospital, fighting her own battle, she continued to check up on her mom and dad and her family,” Murphy said.

“This is a family, by the way, dedicated to health and medicine,” he said.

The governor spoke with Satyender's wife Komlish Khanna, who is a paediatrician. The couple has two more daughters - Sugandha Khanna, an emergency medicine physician and Anisha Khanna, a paediatrician.

“Unbelievable. Our words cannot amply express our condolences nor, I am sure, can they express the pain that the Khanna family is feeling. But I hope that the fact that our entire state mourns with them is some small comfort. And we mourn everyone we have lost. We commit in their memory to saving as many lives as we can,” Murphy said.

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News Network
May 5,2020

May 5: Global coronavirus deaths reached 250,000 on Monday after recorded infections topped 3.5 million, a news agency tally of official government data showed, although the rate of fatalities has slowed.

North America and European countries accounted for most of the new deaths and cases reported in recent days, but numbers were rising from smaller bases in Latin America, Africa and Russia.

Globally, there were 3,062 new deaths and 61,923 new cases over the past 24 hours, taking total cases to 3.58 million.

That easily exceeds the estimated 140,000 deaths worldwide in 2018 caused by measles, and compares with around 3 million to 5 million cases of severe illness caused annually by seasonal influenza, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

While the current trajectory of COVID-19 falls far short of the 1918 Spanish flu, which infected an estimated 500 million people, killing at least 10% of patients, experts worry the available data is underplaying the true impact of the pandemic.

The concerns come as several countries begin to ease strict lockdowns that have been credited with helping contain the spread of the virus.

"We could easily have a second or a third wave because a lot of places aren't immune," Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician and microbiologist at Canberra Hospital, told Reuters. He noted the world was well short of herd immunity, which requires around 60% of the population to have recovered from the disease.

The first death linked to COVID-19 was reported on Jan. 10 in Wuhan, China after the coronavirus first emerged there in December. Global fatalities grew at a rate of 1-2% in recent days, down from 14% on March 21, according to the Reuters data.

DEATH RATE ANOMALIES

Mortality rates from recorded infections vary greatly from country to country.

Collignon said any country with a mortality rate of more than 2% almost certainly had underreported case numbers. Health experts fear those ratios could worsen in regions and countries less prepared to deal with the health crisis.

"If your mortality rate is higher than 2%, you've missed a lot of cases," he said, noting that countries overwhelmed by the outbreak were less likely to conduct testing in the community and record deaths outside of hospitals.

In the United States, around half the country's state governors partially reopened their economies over the weekend, while others, including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, declared the move was premature.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who battled COVID-19 last month, has said the country was over the peak but it was still too early to relax lockdown measures.

Even in countries where the suppression of the disease has been considered successful, such as Australia and New Zealand which have recorded low daily rates of new infections for weeks, officials have been cautious.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has predicated a full lifting of curbs on widespread public adoption of a mobile phone tracking app and increased testing levels.

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